Sunday, August 11, 2013

I
first read Paul Yoon’s collection of stories “Once the Shore” (a title I envy)
last year. I remember the color of the book and the feel of it in my hands.
Published by Sarabande (I almost always love the collections they publish), the
colors of the sea painted its cover and that was all.

Then the stories.

Night
after night I sought them under the dim nightstand light, with my love asleep beside
me. I didn't think that I would like them at first. And then I couldn't pinpoint why these spare and luminous stories followed me through the day like dreams. But it had to do with the poetic
in fiction.

And how to explain?

There
is a part of me that has always wanted to hide in language but equal to this,
there is a me that loves to expose itself. It is not exposure exactly, but a
cutting through to the human truth of something, that gets at the poetic. I
recall reading Julia Kristeva and finding that she believed that the poetic was
simply (though really complexly) the way language made the world anew. And not
only that, in true postmodern riff-raff, it made the world. I recall, once,
thinking that I would watch my child (when I had one ten years later) ever so
carefully as he evolved into language. As language took hold of her. (The body
of the mother [need fulfilled] murdered and made into letters/ language, the
body of the father). Then, I did love to write poetry about such things. Then,
I did love the graduate seminars on semiotics and such that I believed would
grant me access to some mysterious world of academia.

It
can’t be as simple as the poetic makes anew, re-engenders, recreates, can it? I’m
not sure.

When
I think about Paul Yoon's writing I immediately get a tangible sensation. I can
feel the work. I can feel the sea, the ship that carries his Yohan in SnowHunters to a new life, the cool water of a river that took his friend, the
smell of snow in his lost and war-torn country, or the dusty shaft of sunlight coming
through the room where Yohan sews and the radio plays and the dear tailor for
whom he apprentices sips tea as he works. I want to be there. In this
simplicity. In the world anew. There are no distractions, no chaos of social
media, trying to keep up with this and that, and so on. Life is stripped to its
bare essentialness. This is what we are really doing here when and if we can
stop distracting ourselves. But this is any era, not just our own, in which we
are distracted from what is real, what is true and beloved. We mostly all know
what is worth loving. But the poetic seems to conjure this for us. And if we
have forgotten that the act of drinking tea is sacred, the poetic will remind
us.

In
his first and much anticipated novel, Paul Yoon is a poet of fiction. There is
a clarity, a cleanness and a beauty to his spare prose. Here is the way the novel
opens.

“That winter, during a rainfall, he
arrived in Brazil. He came by sea. On the cargo ship he was their only
passenger.”

His
first line announces what the book will offer. It tells us how he will give us
the story. It is not a simple story at all, but he will cut away everything but
what we really need, and give us this gift of clarity. And so he does (He stated in an interview that he cut back much of the writing about the time Yohan spent in a POW camp because he wanted the reader to imagine it). Often his
sentences are short.

“It was now 1954. He stood on the sidewalk, holding the
blue umbrella.”

Here and there we are startled by his words.

“How clean were
the eyes of the dead,” he writes and that is all.

We, he knows, will imagine
more and with a deeper intimacy of our own, and in a way this is how he shines as a writer. He gives the reader room to imagine the story.

In
an interview at the back of the novel he says that he isn't good at writing
dialogue and therefore he avoids it. The first of the three sections of the
book contains no dialogue. Thus like many great writers, he has allowed his
weakness to become what defines his voice, and what makes his work unique. And
thus in this silence we find ourselves deeply embedded in the mind and voice of
our narrator.

Snow Hunters has been called a haunting story about the effects of war and the hope of starting anew. And I agree. Time diminishes only to reappear--Yohan is close and then far far away from his father, the war, from the former lives he has lived. And then finally, he seems to open himself to the future, to see a life renewed.

About Me

I once heard a poet speak of the mouth of the river -- a place I sensed was full and rushing with both glee and the sorrow that makes us seek higher thought through which we might be sustained in this wilderness of passing through. Welcome. Please write me here often.
I am a writer, teacher, and mother living in Vermont.